How Parents Can Combat Liberal Bias in Schools

Shortly after Donald Trump won the presidency last November — in what “Big Agenda” author David Horowitz called a political earthquake — nearly 5,000 Seattle high school students marched out of school to protest the election results. Many of them wore Black Lives Matter T-shirts.

The now-embattled mayor of Seattle, Ed Murray, tweeted his support for those students for standing up for inclusiveness, as the Los Angeles Times reported at the time.

Since then, things in the Emerald City have not calmed down — as the radical Left continues to stoke the embers of rebellion and resistance.

Recently, a cover story for a local parenting magazine offered a detailed step-by-step guide on “how to inspire meaningful rebellion” in children. It advised parents and guardians to allow kids to question their authority and to model the type of rebellion parents believe is important.

Seattle is one of many places across the country that aims to indoctrinate schoolchildren with leftist propaganda. Chicago is another.

Recently, the West Chicago Public Library Board voted 6-1 to keep the age-inappropriate picture book, "This Day in June," which celebrates the LGBT lifestyle, on its shelves, according to the Illinois Family Institute (IFI).

As reported in an article by IFI’s Thomas Madison, 90 percent of those in attendance were pro-LGBT supporters of the book — an all-too-common scenario with book controversies these days. “Those who seek to normalize disordered sexuality are far more passionate, tenacious, and bold than are those who oppose the normalization of sexual deviance,” wrote Madison. “The Left seems to care far more about promoting lies to young children than conservatives do in protecting them from lies.”

Given the liberal madness, “conservative parents need to come out of their shells and — while still being patient, polite, and compassionate — begin conversations within their religious communities, with their children’s teachers, with city officials and school boards, and with other parents,” said Julie Gunlock, a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), a non-partisan research and educational institution in Washington, D.C.

A mother of three young boys and the author of "Cupcakes to Chemicals: How the Culture of Alarmism Makes Us Afraid of Everything and How to Fight Back," Gunlock urges parents to acknowledge the ever-expanding liberal bias in schools — and to fight back.

“It’s an extremely corrosive influence on our children’s education. Parents should understand they need to take action to reverse this trend before it’s too late,” she told LifeZette. “For too long, conservative parents have sat back and let the pendulum swing far to the Left.”

And while Gunlock acknowledges that most teachers do their best to keep politics out of the classroom, “increasingly now, we see this changing, with some teachers feeling it’s their duty to go beyond the three Rs — reading, writing and arithmetic. Today, some teachers want to expand general education to include extreme left-wing social justice issues, animal rights, environmental issues, and the agenda of the LGBT community,” she said.

Parents should be quick to heed Gunlock’s warning. Public school teachers are behind the leading far-left militant group By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) that is part of the Antifa network, which federal officials say is committing “domestic terrorist violence," as a recent Daily Caller article noted.

BAMN also played a key role in riots in Berkeley, Sacramento and elsewhere, with scores of public school teachers among its ranks — including Yvette Felarca, a Berkeley middle school teacher and pro-violence militant.

And let’s not forget the recent incident when a first grade girl was sent to the school office — and questioned for bullying after allegedly "misgendering" a classmate in a “pronoun mishap” at Rocklin Academy in California. Rocklin has been mired in controversy ever since a kindergarten teacher included a “gender reveal” for a little boy who was transitioning to a girl, according to a report by Fox News.

With expanding culture wars and liberal bias in schools, Gunlock said that “parents need to speak up and tell school officials that the discussion of certain topics and political activism inside the classroom will not be tolerated.”

“Demand to know specifics, and make your opinion known if you disagree with a particular lesson plan or the inclusion of certain subjects,” she added.

And if that doesn’t work: “Parents can start pulling their children out of public schools and transferring them to either religious schools or beginning to home-school them,” said Gunlock — though she acknowledges not all parents are in a position to do either of those.

“People should have greater choice in where their children attend school — especially if there’s going to be such a cultural and political disconnect between teachers and parents,” she said.

And though Gunlock realizes it’s hard to go against what’s considered politically correct, “it takes only one brave voice to encourage others to engage and speak up,” she said.

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Independent Women’s Forum’s mission is to improve the lives of Americans by increasing the number of women who value free markets and personal liberty. Sister organization of Independent Women’s Voice.